NewsAug 28, 2026, 07:08 UTC

Data becomes the moat in the AI era

Key takeaways from the No Priors interview with Eon co-founders Ofir Ehrlich (CEO) and Gonen Stein (CRO) (August 2026):

A new data foundation for the AI era. Eon maps and classifies an organisation's data across multiple hyperscalers, ingests structured and unstructured sources into a single foundation, and makes it cost-effective to protect, query and apply AI models on top of it.

From backup to enterprise memory. The company began as cloud backup and disaster recovery, then realised that a customer's full history of data could be activated for AI applications once mapped, classified and permission-controlled.

Data as the durable moat. The founders argue that models and compute are increasingly ephemeral with near-zero switching costs, so a company's proprietary data is its most valuable and defensible asset.

The bankruptcy data land-grab. They point to Google reportedly paying around $10 million for bankrupt Spirit Airlines' data (not its aircraft), with Mercor said to be an under-bidder, as a sign of enterprise data sets becoming AI training targets.

Non-human threats on steroids. AI agents now hold legitimate permissions inside enterprises and can drop tables or leak sensitive data at extreme velocity; Eon applies its ransomware-style detection and granular recovery to this new class of actor.

Everyone becomes a builder. Non-technical staff using tools like Lovable increasingly move company data outside the organisation's rules, creating governance and compliance exposure that Eon's classification and audit layer is designed to contain.

A serial-founder pedigree. Before Eon the team built CloudEndure, acquired by AWS, where they ran large-scale enterprise cloud migrations; they see the AI shift as the same transition "on steroids", happening far faster.